The biggest risk to gentrification surely has it’s roots in a long extended critical shortage of housing….

You fix housing and everything becomes workable.

From the ‘Making Boston Better for Artists’ article posted in the Globe a few days ago, someone wrote,

"Ask artists who’ve been around for a while, and they’ll tell Mr. Mayor that Boston’s cost of living, including high rents and taxes, is what discourages them from staying…"

Judging by what they post in the Globe, the loud nimby solution to housing might be to just offer people coupons to just up and ‘move away’ from Boston.

Or they suggest ‘sensible building.’ Translation; endless, low brick.

Won’t work.

53,000 units by 2030. Good idea. Not easy…

For a long time, we grew at a fraction of the rest of the country. But, in recent years, the population rose by ~90,000 people… Yet, through the years dating back to about 1990, residential construction has lagged behind with relatively few housing units added until this current cycle.

The Donahue Institute projects Boston’s population could swell by about 100,000 more people by 2035.

Boston’s high rents are hitting all but the affluent very hard. The share of homeowners who are ’cost burdened; (spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing) has skyrocketed from about 25 percent in 2000 to about 40% in 2016. Over this time, the number of cost burdened renters increased from about 38% to 55%.

So Mayor Walsh called for 53,000 housing units to be built by 2030…

i don’t know if the people of Boston have a grasp on what 53,000 housing units is going to look like. Judging by the way many opposed to development post, they must live in some form of alternative reality…

If we want people to have a place to live, we’re going to have to become more open to building…

Boston is an urban zone with the eminence to build.

On February 11, 2016, when a proposal to build a 44-story residence tower at the Garden Garage site passed by a vote of 5-0, a few West End residents expressed a mixture of amazement and grief. After 30 years of knocking 10 or 20 floors off every last box turd in the city, instead of caving to the anti-development nimby agenda – the BRA made a principled decision for Boston on one of the last high rise parcels in the city….

The decision to let ‘Equity’ build across the street from the 450 ft Avalon tower at TD Garden was an easy one; and not just because the general location is already disrupted with the Boston Properties podium construction at TD Garden. It was made with many considerations about what’s best for Boston.

A few loud anti-development people are back making noise about another ‘Equity’ build site: a proposed 377’/mixed income/385 unit apartment tower at 45 Worthington Street, in Mission Hill.

Activist, Kathleen Ryan has warned neighborhood residents "You’re next…" followed by the oft heard battle cry announcing; "Evil Developer’s proposed tower is out of scale and wrong for the Mission Hill neighborhood."

Actually, this site can handle 377' easily. It has a bit of separation from other large construction on a non-shade challenged parcel. The low highrise would moderately raise the ceiling of the existing ~230’ neighboring apartment boxes and dorms nearby. It’s a home run.

If not here – where??

Instead of singling out 1 project – we should be talking about exactly what fusion of low, medium and tall building will bring an end to the housing crisis.

To people not fond of development; the real numbers are going to look ‘austere.’

We simply can not reach 53,000 units with infill and mid-rise construction alone. Highrise construction is going to have to be in the picture…. ….When you add up all the infill that will be politically feasible in the coming years, we still come up short by as many as 25,000 units.

You begin to see why we can no-longer build Soviet-era 10 story apartments on our last few +137m highrise parcels… Sites eyed for 10 stories will need to go 18. Others good for 14-18 would need to go higher still.

Before we begin tearing through 2 and 3 story neighborhoods (built of wood) from Allston to Dorchester, we’ll need to build as many as 50-55 ~325 unit resident towers +90-120m throughout the city…. Maybe 15-20 built up to +137m in and immediately adjacent to the High Spine… then each of the neighborhoods getting 2 or 3 going to +90~120m from Brighton to the South End, JP to Dorchester.

We have a few luxury highrises going up and people will move in. It takes many years to plan and build these……. Contrary to what some nimby say, people moving up out of lower cost units into luxury low-skyscrapers most certainly do create vacancies for the next tier below, those people in turn, vacate lower cost units and so on… Luxury housing absolutely contributes to the total number of units coming on line. Still, it isn’t going to make up a significantly large portion of the 53,000. But every bit helps.

Colleges submitted their master plans to bring students in from the brownstones off the Emerald Necklace back into new, tall dorms. More space in the neighborhoods will soon be freed up.

Still, at the present time, it looks like we will not get near to the scale of development (required to bring long-term relief) before the nimby’s will be agitating, hurling endless accusations and slander against Mayor Walsh, Dir Golden, and the BRA/EDIC board.

But the nimby makes a largely, a nonsensical argument that pales in comparison to our housing woes… talking in circles, and defaulting back to a thinly veiled message: ‘the critical needs of Boston are an abstract that does not apply to me or my neighborhood. You can’t build that here because i don’t want that built here. My vote is subject to bribery.’ Then followed by non-denial denials that their mischief isn’t harming Boston. It is.

We can’t fail to provide good, affordable housing where it is critically needed. The large majority of people know we wouldn’t just be telling tens of thousands of talented people who want to come and raise families here ‘sorry, you can’t come…’ Businesses will stop locating to Boston or be forced to leave because their employees can’t find a decent place to live.

With respect to preserving space for office development; we should not build 250 foot box turd offices on our last +180m low skyscraper parcels – or tie them off in nimby red-tape for 15 years;

Decisions on where and how tall for future office and resident highrises cannot be based solely upon 60 year old zoning from the dark ages; a few parcels must be transposed, with more emphasis given to 4 criteria:

1. is it good for Boston?
2. access to transportation that will covered by improvements to the MBTA.
3. shade over green spaces.
4. long term revenue considerations.